Connolly stared at the coffee, then looked up at Eisler as if he were someone else. The last thing he had ever imagined him to be was daring. “You must have nerves of steel,” he said finally. “That’s like playing chicken.”
“Dragon,” Eisler corrected him.
“What?”
“We call it the Dragon Experiment-tickling the tail of the sleeping dragon.”
“And you don’t worry you’ll blow the place up?”
“No. We can control that. It’s the radiation that’s dangerous.”
“Well, better you than me.”
“Mr. Connolly, please don’t be so impressed. It’s a scientific experiment, no more. I think sometimes we’re all tickling the dragon, just a little. Testing how far we can go. Don’t you feel that? It’s only—” he searched, “the radiation we don’t expect.”
“I guess,” Connolly said, feeling that Eisler was really talking to himself.
“And now may I ask you something?” Eisler said politely. “What do you do? You’re not a driver.” He anticipated Connolly’s protest with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Please. I know. Drivers don’t go to Weber’s for the music. Oppie wants to drive with you alone. That’s very unusual, you know. We notice things like that. You have my dossier. I assume others as well. What exactly are you doing here? Am I permitted to know? A government agent of some sort, I think. So there must be something wrong. What dragon are you tickling?”
Connolly was struck again by how different the emigres were. Their first assumptions were still those of the police state.
“No,” he said, “nothing like that. I’m just helping to investigate a murder.”
“Oh? Whose?” His voice was so controlled and deliberate that Connolly took it for indifference.
“A security officer named Bruner.”
Eisler sipped his coffee, saying nothing.
“Did you know him?”
“No. That is, I knew who he was. We are still a small community on the project. I was sorry to hear about it. I didn’t realize it was a security matter,” he said, the last an uninflected question.
“It may not be.”
Eisler raised his eyebrows in another question, but Connolly didn’t elaborate.
“But you don’t know who killed him?”
“Not yet.”
“I see,” he said slowly, pushing aside his tray. “So you will be our sword of justice. Well, I wish you success in your hunt. To think of catching even one. So many dead these days, and never any killers.”
“I’m only looking for one in particular.”
“Yes, of course. Forgive me. I seem always to argue philosophy when you have work to do.”
“Are you married?”
Eisler looked at him dumbfounded, the subject swerving so abruptly that he’d been caught in its whiplash. Connolly could see him sorting through explanations and failing, until he sputtered a sort of laugh. “Why do you ask? Is it the investigation? Place of birth, school, married—”
“No, just curious.”
Eisler looked at him thoughtfully now. “I think you are never just curious, Mr. Connolly.” He sipped his coffee. “I was married. She’s dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, it was a long time ago. Many years now. Trude. She was killed-no, not like your friend. There was no killer. A street fight in Berlin. We used to have so many in those days. The Freikorps and the GPD and-Who remembers them now? What could have been so important? But riots, you know, real blood in the streets. If you happened to pass by, you could get caught. Just taking the wrong street. Like a traffic accident. So.”
“You never knew who killed her?”
“Who? Who?” he said, his gentle voice impatient now. “History killed her. There’s no one to hunt. Like a disease.” He shrugged.
“I’m sorry. You must still miss her.”
“No, Mr. Connolly. I’m not a romantic. She’s dead. I put the past behind me. The old world. Isn’t that the American idea? Start fresh, leave everything behind?” Connolly thought of the white empty stretch of desert, his own impulse for something new. “No more history. You don’t believe in history here. Yet. Sometimes I think we don’t believe in anything else. So. We’ll see who was right.”
“And what would you bet?”
Eisler smiled. “Twenty thousand tons. For the rest, I don’t know. It’s hard to leave everything behind. It’s always there somewhere. You think-but then it surprises you. A little like the dragon’s tail, eh?”
“What is?” said Oppenheimer, putting his coffee on the table as he took a chair. He seemed jumpy and annoyed.
“History and philosophy,” Eisler said. “Such matters.”
Oppenheimer shot Connolly a glance. “Another seminar? How about finding us some gas instead? We need to start back or we’ll be up all night.”
“You’re not eating, Robert?” Eisler said.
“No, just coffee.” He scratched one of his hands.
“You should eat something,” Eisler said kindly.
“Not now,” he snapped. It seemed to Connolly he was living on nerves. “What a godforsaken place,” he said, rubbing his hand again. “You wash and the water’s so hard you’re covered with magnesium oxide. Now I’ll be scratching all night.”
Connolly smiled at the scientific exactness of the complaint. It was, he realized, the first time he had ever heard Oppenheimer complain about anything. He had seen him buried under work, exasperated, worried, but that all seemed part of what he liked. Other people complained, leaned on his endless optimism to keep them going. If he felt things were all right, then the problems were just sandflies. Now, however, he was irritated and fretful, finally done in by an itch.
“We have five trunk lines here. You’d think they could manage to keep one open. G.G. throws a fit when he’s cut off. Now we have to sit around and wait for them to get the connection back. Waste of time.”
“In that case,” Eisler said, “have a little something. You’ll get sick. A roll, even.”
“Friedrich, stop hovering. I’m fine. I heard something today that might interest you, by the way.”
“Yes, Robert?” he said, chastened.
“The army took Stassfurt.” He paused, waiting for a response, then plunged in. “The Germans had the uranium ore there. Over a thousand tons, most of the original Belgian supply. They can’t have much anywhere else, so I think we can rule out the possibility of a German gadget.”
It seemed to Connolly he was taunting Eisler, getting back at him for having raised any qualms at all, and Connolly was surprised by the sharp cruelty of it. No more Nazis to give permission. He was daring him to question the project again.
But Eisler refused to be drawn. “That’s everything we hoped for,” he said carefully.
“Yes. Now there’s only the Japanese.”
Eisler’s face clouded for only a moment, but what Connolly saw there was terrible, a resignation so profound it looked fated, as if a long-awaited punishment had finally been handed out. And then it cleared and he was composed again. “Yes,” he said.
Was Oppenheimer aware of what he was doing? Connolly looked again at Eisler, so easily troubled, so alert to contradiction, and he wondered if what Oppenheimer saw was some part of himself he needed to override. How else to become a general, to see things through, but to put everything else aside? The prize no longer allowed him any doubts, not in any part of himself.
“Phone call, sir.” The GI had barely reached the table when Oppenheimer leaped up. “No, sir, sorry, not for you. For Mr. Connolly.”
Oppenheimer was too surprised to be angry. Since he was already standing, he made an “After you” sweep of his hand. But the unexpectedness of it restored his good spirits, and he laughed at himself.
“Don’t tie up the line. You’ll keep the general waiting. And by the way, tell your mother or whoever it is that it’s illegal to call here.”
